Anniversary of AS-400

 Saw a Facebook post in 2016 commemorating AS-400 (leaving the county FSA office).  Clicked on the hashtag and found some posts about job opportunities working on AS-400 programs, some dated relatively recently (i.e., 2021).  

IIRC the changeover from the System/36 to the AS-400 was happening as I retired in 1997. So the System/36 lasted maybe 10-15 years; the AS-400 maybe 20 years or so. 

Form Design in the Digital Age

 An experience with the Massachusetts online application for an ID (just testing) got me to thinking.

Back in the day, that is the early 1990s', we got PC's with Wordperfect 5.0 at work. One of the things I played around with then was using its table tools to create Wordperfect versions of our printed forms. A good part of the motivation was just the challenge in seeing how far I could get and what was involved in getting as close a facsimile as possible.  IIRC sometimes I was able to create a version where you could enter data.  And I think the ASCS/FSA forms shop followed a similar path for some years, replacing the IBM composers they were using in the 1960s with PCs and Wordperfect.

The next step seems (when I retired I no longer was involved on the creation side) to have been creating online forms with data entry. I don't know the software behind those forms, but over the years I've run into them.  

But when you look at that process, it's a survival, like an appendix or wisdom teeth, left over from prior times.

Currently I seem to be encountering the interview process--a series of windows which ask for data piece by piece, with "back" and "continue" options and often with the data entered determined the next sequence of windows to be displayed.  That seemed to be the case with the MA application, also with the Kaiser Permanente appointment process I just completed, and in a modified form with TurboTax's process.  TurboTax is interesting because the end result of your interview entries is a completed set of tax forms for the user, although it looks as if the data sent to the IRS and VA tax people is stripped down to the data elements. 

Perhaps 50 years from now we'll no longer be using forms? 

Surprising Fact About India

This blog post claims IT is the biggest industry. It does it by excluding farming as an industry, which is reasonable, I guess.

Nostalgia for the System/36

 Brent Orr posted on Facebook about the System/36, which evoked a lot nostalgia from old-timers. Given the amount of cursing from the counties in 1985-90 it's a bit amusing to hear about how reliable the software and system were, etc. etc.  Lots of complaints early on which now faded away in memory.

I must admit it's rather satisfying though, because I and others invested a lot of time and energy, sweat and tears in it.  (I don't remember any blood being shed, but I remember a number of occasions where I drove my employees to tears.) 

Protecting Our IT Infrastructure--and Bureaucracy

 Fred Kaplan has a Slate article on the problem of preventing attacks on IT infrastructure.  NSA has the charter to prevent attacks from foreign countries, but is prohibited from handling attacks based in the US, which is the loophole used by the recent Tradewinds attacks

Secretaries Gates (DOD) and Napolitano (DHS) had a plan to fill the hole, but Kaplan's piece gives the sorry history of how the workings of bureaucracy, NIHism, and different policy outlooks made the plan fail. 

Working across organizational divisions is always problematic.  VA and DOD have the problem of health records between active/reserve military and veterans; the FBI and NSA have the problem in counter-intelligence operations; State and DOD have the problem of state-building (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan); SCS and ASCS had the problem in handling sodbuster/swampbuster problems. 

Silos.  You can't live without them, you can't live with them.

Banks With No Cash?

In Sweden, according to Steve Kelman here at FCW: ". In what might sound like a joke if it weren’t true, many banks carry no cash on their premises." Kelman is writing about Sweden and China, which he finds to be ahead of the U.S. in some areas of adopting IT:

"First, other countries’ edge over us is sometimes due to technology developed first outside the U.S., sometimes to quicker user adoption (something that would probably surprise most Americans), and sometimes to a greater ability to make non-tech organizational adjustments, such as eliminating minimum transaction values on credit cars, to get the tech to work better. Second, there are clearly efficiency benefits to the new technologies -- think only of the decline in hold ups in stores and bank robberies thanks to the disappearance of cash. But there are also benefits in terms of the general social climate for innovation."

The Great Blog Post Title Is:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610229/how-to-teach-a-robot-to-screw/

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Cows Don't Have Privacy Any More

The Internet for Things also applies to dairy cows.  This piece describes 4 ways in which cows are being tracked: movement and location, behavior, activity, and lactation.

I'm Not Sane--per K. Williamson

Kevin Williamson has a column on institutions and the FBI, writing:

"And no sane person believes for a nanosecond that those “lost” communications represent anything other than willful obstruction of justice." 

Personally, I'd be willing to bet that the reasons the emails were "lost" can be traced to a long lasting gap in bureaucratic cultures.  Specifically, the records management people have always focused on paper preservation, and rarely have ranked high in the pecking in bureaucracies.  It's taken 20 years for NARA to start to accommodate electronic records, and I suspect they've yet to achieve full integration.  

The IT folks, on the other hand, have a culture focused on the future and a bit on the present, but rarely on the past.  C.P. Snow in the 1950's had a book entitled "Two Cultures", arguing that science and the  humanities didn't talk to each other, and they should.  Today's divide between archives and IT is worse.

In the middle of all this are the people who have to implement IT rules and archive requirements--the users.  These are the people who leave their passwords at the default, or use admin1234. 

Toss in Murphy's Law, and I'll bet there was no willful obstruction of justice.

How the Brits Do Government IT

The blog.Gov.uk site is the blog for the UK government, as you might guess.  It's interesting to follow the posts, seeing some of the differences and some of the similarities between British IT and US IT.  The British government is a lot more centralized than the US, both at the national level with its civil service setup which uses more cross-department transfers than the US (SES was supposed to incorporate that, but doesn't really), and in the structure of local government--no federalism.

Even though their IT efforts seems to follow the same pattern, with more basic applications being shared across departments, they still have silos.  An excerpt:

"We transitioned 300+ websites onto one platform in 15 months. That meant we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to look properly at how that content fitted together.
And because each organisation’s website moved on to GOV.UK separately, that content came onto the site siloed and has remained siloed. And there are now more than 300,000 individual items on GOV.UK."

Why Don't IT Contractors Fail?

Just finished reading The Confidence Game,--anyone who enjoyed The Sting and the David Mamet film House of Games (which inspired the book) will enjoy it.  The author views con artists running con games as employing human traits, the desire to believe, the desire for meaning, the reluctance to cut one's losses, etc.we all share. With that perspective, I was struck by the question in my title.

How did I get there?  It's true, I believe, that most massive IT projects, possibly especially those in government, fail; the success rate is maybe 30 percent.  With that sort of track record, why do we in government keep creating and funding the projects and why can IT contractors get contracts to run them?  Surely if Elon Musk's space venture only got into orbit 30 percent of the time, he'd fail to attract venture capital.  But as far as I can tell (not very far), no big IT contractor has gone out of business because they can't get any more contracts.  So why?

Maybe they're running a con game?  After all that in the beginning there's lots of enthusiasm, enough to sweep agency employees, agency officials, even OMB and Congress into supporting the project.  A big project may paradoxically be easier to sell than a small one: a big project has meaning, it offers to change many things, to solve lots of problems, etc. etc. For IT projects it's likely that management and Congress don't really understand the nuts and bolts; they just know that people who should know, who seem to know, claim it can work, can succeed.   In the early stages it's easy to use the project focus to find more improvements to make, problems to solve, things to be folded into the project scope.  And once you're committed to a project, your reputation is involved, there's money been spent, meetings have been held, promises made.  And the problems surely are fixable, no need to abandon hope, just spend a little more money here, work some more hours there, move the schedule back just a little.

Finally there's a loss of confidence by those who should know, an increasing desperation, and Congress and management cut their losses, a process made much easier because there's been turnover in both areas so they aren't killing their own baby, it's some else's bastard child.  That can in turn make it easier for those who know (who haven't retired or moved to higher paying private jobs) to blame the big shots for not keeping the faith.

Meanwhile the IT contractors can move on to run another con.

Note: I don't necessarily think IT contractors are knowingly con artists; they may be conning themselves as much as their customers and they do have the occasional success.

Government Software Purchases

When I left FSA, COTS was a big thing (commercial off the shelf software).    I assume it's still a big thing.

GovExec has a piece on the UK experience in trying to rationalize government purchases of COTS.  (I remember in the early 1990's when they tried to standardize ASCS on Wordperfect, Paradox, and Lotus 1-2-3.  )

Why shouldn't the government save billions by standardizing on Libreoffice?

Insurance Against Ransomware?

LA hospital paid ransom to free up their IT systems.  Technology Review explains vulnerability.  I wonder if any insurance company is offering insurance against this risk?  It seems a logical step, which would also provide financing for investigators to work against such hackers.

Fortran?? Really, Fortran

FCW has a post on supporting Fortran, by "accommodating the legacy code with an open-source Fortran compiler to help integrate the programming language into a larger pool of computer languages in supercomputers."

Fortran was old when I was learning COBOL back in the 70's.  And most of the people in the US have never heard of either, too young.

Humans Are Doomed: Robots Teach Each Other

That's my hysterical take-away from this Technology Review piece on how one robot at Cornell taught a different robot at Brown to do a task it had learned.

I've mentioned a point on self-driving cars before: once you get a car to handle a new situation, it's done, unlike humans who even if they don't forget what they've learned, only imperfectly learned the lessons of their elders. So learning for robots is one baby step, then another baby step whereas learning for humans is one step forward, one step forward, one step backward, and then the grave.

Design the World for Robots or Design Robots for the World

That was the question I had when reading this piece  in Technology Review.  The bottom line is that it's very hard for a robot to assemble an Ikea chair--inserting a dowel into a hole is right at the edge of perception.  Robotics is getting there, but it's a pain.  The logical answer is to redesign the world so robots can handle things.  Unfortunately, that limits the available market for robots. 

I assume we'll reach a point where new processes are designed for robots.  (Maybe we've already done that with the chip industry? :-)

Software "Containers" and Object-Oriented

Back when I exited the field, "object-oriented" software was the buzzword of the day.  If I remember, the idea was that a given software "object" was self-contained; once the object was coded and tested, you could count on it.

So 17 years pass and now the NYTimes describes some outfit doing software containers as the hot new thing.  Too much time has passed for me to understand the difference, except for a vague idea that software containers may be more independent of their operating system and programming language than the old "objects'. 

Seems I'll have to add "containers" to "string theory" as cases where the advance of knowledge has left me in the dust.

Robot Day: Cows and Grapes

The NY Times has an article on milking robots. 
I'd read about robotic milkers before, perhaps even posted on them, but this is the first report describing units with no human intervention, meaning the cows can determine when they want to be milked!  So the march of technology has the effect of increasing the "agency" of cows, making for more contented cows, I suppose.  (Was it Elsie, the Carnation cow, which keyed their ad campaigns in the 1950's?   NO, my memory is faulty--Elsie was the Borden's cow.  And, coincidentally, one of the dairymen in the article is named Borden, a seventh-generation farmer.)  Will the crunchy food movement celebrate this advance in animal liberation? 

Seriously, this and similar advances elsewhere in farming pose the problem for the farmer: give up, get out, grow up.  You need a bigger operation to make the best use of machines (although apparently California operations are too big) or cope with new regulations, etc.   The other problem is the infrastructure.  If you're depending on a machine to milk your cows, you can't afford power outages (hand-milking even 12 cows when the power goes off is not fun).  And you can't afford malfunctions--I assume the vendors have some support system to provide loaner units with a very short response time, like 1-3 hours.

Elsewhere, Technology Review has a post on agricultural drones. I wonder when FSA will start using them?

Amazing Sentence of Today: Judges Err

"n ordinary litigation, the judges misunderstand things all the time and reach decisions anyway, and they rarely discover all that they’ve misunderstood.  "

This sentence is from a very good post by Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy discussing the recently declassified FISA court materials.  Don't know whether he's right, but two points he makes:

• the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence which played a disputed role in the failures to prevent 9/11 was unreasonably enforced by Judge Royce Lamberth.
• cultural differences between IT types and legal types may have played a big part in the problems.  (That's an attractive argument to me: I believe in Murphy's Law.)

Faith in Congress and Computers

We had such faith in our institutions and the computer 45 years ago.  Technology Review reprints a piece from 1968 in which a political science prof predicted the future:

One can readily foresee a congressman sitting at a console in his office poring over computer print-outs into the late evening hours or over the weekend and cutting through the paper arguments and justifications of executive programs with penetrating lines of questions. The possibility of abuse also exists, but the weight of past congressional experience suggests that most congressmen will use such new investigative power wisely. In situations that invite adversary argument, alternative positions and points of view will be more thoroughly developed and cogently presented.

[updated to add title and link]